Antonioni's The Passenger

I was very excited to finally see Antonioni's The Passenger.
As you can imagine I was attracted to the theme's of identity.
I was particularly taken with this scene, described below.
Locke (Jack Nicholson) is a television reporter working in Central Africa. He is there trying to get a story about a rebel movement, trying to overthrow the government.
But he has been frustrated at every turn, and it is clear that Locke is not a happy man.
He returns to his hotel and knocks on the door of another westerner, Robertson. But Robertson is dead.
Locke has decided to switch identities. Become Locke. He takes Robertson's passport and returns to his own room.
















Locke at his desk. The two passports in front of him.















Locke looks down at the table, first at his own passport - the camera pans right to left - and then at Robertson's.













We hear a knock. Locke looks up. We think someone is at the door.
We hear Locke answer, but not speak. A flashback?
We hear another man. This voice must be of Robertson. Locke is remembering when he met Robertson.















Locke cuts out Robertson's passport photo.
We listen as Locke explains why he is in Africa.















From Locke the camera pans across to the chair. We see a tape recorder, and if we look carefully we see that it is running. This is not a memory of Locke's. It is a recording of a conversation.














Locke at his desk again. He looks up and the camera pans right to left again. This time to the window. Through the window we can see an empty terrace, and the desert in the background.
A man comes onto the terrace. We do not know yet that this is Robertson. He speaks to someone we cannot see.
















Then Locke comes and stands next to Robertson. They look out into the desert.
We have slipped back in time.
Robertson tells Locke that he has been in so many places that it doesn't make any difference anymore. The key theme of the film is established.

















We cut to a doorway. Locke and Robertson come and continue to speak.
Robertson tells Locke that he has no family, nor friends.
Locke goes off left to retrieve another drink. Robertson continues to speak to him, off-camera (he looks to our left).
Then the camera pans left to right. For the first time.















We return to Locke at the table. We have slipped forward in time.
















Locke turns off the recorder.
The next scene is off Locke taking Robertson's body from his own room to Locke's. Robertson will become Locke. Locke, Robertson.
The switch is complete.

Tarkovsky and the other side

The other night, unable to sleep, I put on Mirror my laptop, and placed it next to my pillow. I often find that trying to read subtitles in a difficult Russian film at 3am makes sleep a little easier.
This night it didn't work. I went through Mirror for the 10th time. What I had forgotten was the amazing scene with Ignat, and Maria Nikolaevna. Ignat's mother leaves him in his father's flat waiting for Maria. He sees his mother out the door, crosses the hallway and is disturbed by the the sound of cups. Maria is there, at the table, looking for Ignat. There is a maid as well. And what was an empty hallway in the previous shot now includes chairs, mirrors, and lighting. She asks him to read from a book on one of the shelves, Pushkin's letters. As she listens the light in the room changes, as if the sun were slipping in and out from behind clouds.
Just as he finishes there is a knock at the door. Or rather Ignat looks to the door as if there was a knock. And Maria encourages him to open the door. But I could hear no knock.
He opens the door. It is an old woman. She looks confused, apologises, says she has the wrong flat and leaves (she looks like Ignat's grandmothers - we see photos of her later).
Ignat closes the door and goes back into the flat, but Maria has gone.
On the table, a circle of steam remains from where Maria's tea cup had rested. It quickly disappears.

Coincidence and the past - II

Later, Claire and Robert are over for dinner.
Claire (now joined in this debate, it involves her too, it was crucial moment in her life as well) can produce polaroids of her flat. Of parties.
The debate is enlarged, revised, extended.
What would Claire feel?
This is the moment she lost Paul to Claire (and as a consequence ended up with Robert, a dead-end).
She would fear being drawn into their domestic squabble.
She would wonder at her current situation and speculate at how it could have all been different (and then we see the power of the three-part version of the story, as we see this to be a false hope. Her relationship with Paul is not any better than the one with Robert).
All this time Robert is in the background, listening.
Claire is aware of injustice and the universe.
She gets angry. At this game playing.
What the hell does it matter?
This is more likely. She pretend anger with Robert, but she is more angry with the universe.
Why has she been left out of the scenario/been done such an injustice?

Three-part version: Paul (-Claire) synopsis

Paul (-Claire)
With Sophie, Paul knew who he was and what he wanted, but with Claire he is another man. For Paul, Claire's reticence and secrecy are part of her inability to commit to their relationship, driving Paul to despair. His relationship with Claire is fundamental to who he is as a person. Paul sets out to take revenge, spends the night with a stranger, and returns in the morning, wondering about the consequences. But Claire has disappeared, and when Paul sets out to find her, and learn who she was really was, his life goes into a spiral. It's as if he were no longer complete. It might look like a game, but for Paul it is critical. He does everything to find her, and with Sophie's help, tracks down Claire's twin sister, Natalie. His reception is not friendly. Claire and Natalie did not enjoy the novelty of being twins. They found it a challenge to their identity. But with a little charm Paul is able to able to talk to Natalie. He intrigues with the question, why did it not work with Claire and himself? It is as if Paul was smitten. If he can't have Claire perhaps he can have Natalie? Or is it really Claire? No matter.

Three-part version: Claire (-Paul) synopsis

Claire (-Paul)
But what if this were not true for someone? What if, no matter who they were with they were the same? That they didn't really change for they were with, and by implication, they didn't care. They weren't really affected by that person. This is Claire, Sophie's friend. In Sophie (+Paul) Claire's relationship with her husband is falling apart. She looks at Sophie's nearly perfect relationship with Paul and wonders what is wrong with her? What's more, when Sophie met Paul he was going out with Paul. But now in Claire (-Paul) she is with Paul. What would it be like to feel so completely for someone? The kind of relationship her twin sister Natalie has with Nick? Claire gets her chance when Natalie disappears. She takes up Natalie's life, and begins a relationship with Nick. Why? After the disastrous relationship with Paul she needs to find out if she can care.

Three-part version: Sophie + Paul synopsis

Sophie + Paul
Sophie has a great relationship with Paul. He knows who he is, and makes those around him comfortable. They live in the sky above the Thames, a hi-rise set of flats from where they can see river and the tidal barrier. But it all begins to fall apart one day when they begin to look into the circumstance of their first meeting: coincidence. This realisation means that any relationship, even a good one, is arbitrary, it could as easily not be. Paul recognises the danger. 'We are not an accident' and 'It's not that I believe in destiny, it's that I can believe in 'coincidence'. But it is too late. This begins to erode Sophie and Paul's relationship. At the same (or because of it?) they are 'haunted' by people or events from this 'other life'.

Haunted by the other 'life'

Both versions of this story begin centre on the the theme that each possibility of our life is equally legitimate. There are endless other lives, universes, or threads. We might have become these, or we may one day become them.
And in this story all the characters are in one way haunted by these other lives. I am deliberately playing on the horror/thriller genre here.
A recurring incident in Sophie's and Paul's story: one night Paul spys a car parked below their hi-rise flat. The engine is running and the wipers wave back and forth. Though it is impossible to see clearly because of the dark and the rain, both Paul and Sophie believe that the driver is parked there looking up at them in their flat, and that the driver is a woman. Paul is angry and threatened. He wants to confront the woman, though he cannot say why. Sophie is frightened and would rather hide in the bedroom than confront her.
At the end of Paul's and Sophie's story Sophie is again at the window and the car is below.
In the car is Sophie too. Another thread. She is not with Paul (or with anyone). She lives in a house (not a flat) and struggles for direction (unlike the first Sophie who is so certain about what she is).

Coincidence and the past

One part of this story charts the downward spiral of Sophie's and Paul's relationship once they recognise that their near-perfect relationship rests on the coincidence and chance that brought them together.
Some of my critics accepts this, others don't. The doubters would say that it would not matter how the relationship began. What counts is the strength of their relationship. I would say that accepting a universe governed by chance and coincidence would make anyone doubt the veracity of any kind of relationship. What would this near-perfect relationship be based on? Such a thing could not exist.
So Sophie and Paul begin by disagreeing over the circumstances of their meeting. Paul must believe in fate because he cannot accept chance. That would be the end of them and he recognises the danger. Sophie believes in chance unconsciously, and if aware of the danger cannot turn from the conviction of the idea. They begin to re-rehearse the events of their meeting, a party at Claire's flat (Sophie's friend). What music was playing? Where were they sitting? How did they begin to talk? What sparked the relationship?
The debate can revolve around one incident - an accident? A lamp is pushed over. How did it happen? Paul can claim he did.
It altered the situation. A shared experience.
Paul spoke to Sophie. They had ignored each other until now. Did Sophie dislike him for Claire's sake?
Paul believed that Sophie was jealous.

Why Tarkovsky and the long-take?

I need to say more about the theme.
One tenet: that we are different people with different people. Who we are and who we might become is dependent upon who we are with now and who we are with (or without) in the future.
Time and chance define our identity. In the three-story version each thread is equally valid. One may show the characters in one situation (in part one Sophie and Paul are a couple) and another in a different situation (Paul and Claire are a couple, at least temporarily, and Sophie, Claire's best friend, doesn't particularly like Paul).
Other threads overlap. In two, Paul is the person Claire left behind. In three it we see much of the same story from his viewpoint. Much is the same. Some is different.
Each thread of time is equally valid.
This is where I make the leap to the long-take: each captures a segment of each thread. Each is true, for that moment in time. One does not supersede the other. Each successive shot amplifies the effect. The edits would come naturally, joining two captures of time. The approach to the shooting, the shooting style, cannot be divorced from the essence of cinema.
You can see how this would be the case with number of short-takes. I feel that the weight of time would be absent, dispersed. The edits more a case of convention than anything else. Coverage.
At the same time I am not suggesting that each take = the scene, as in Haneke's Code Unknown.
Taking this approach into the studio with the actors, the construct of the long-take will shape the scene, pushed in one direction or another.

How do I make this thing?

This is not all theory. I am truly struggling to conceive of a way to approach the shooting of this film.
Think of Wong Kar-Wai's In the Mood for Love. The couple are seen between lampshades, around doorways, below the jackets hanging in the closed. Snapped. Glimpsed. They are repeatedly reframed. Seen from this the same position, but with a different frame, different focal length.
What is this about? (I am under no illusion that there is great idea trying to break forth).
This is about memory. It is unreliable. Partial. Fragmented.
Also look at Michael Haneke's Code Unknown. Yes, long-takes, but more than that: each shot is a scene. Usually it the world of one character (though the street scene includes all the characters of the film, in some manner).
For example: a father at the farmhouse table eating a simple dinner. The young son has disappeared. Not a word. Ungrateful. There is a noise off. The son has returned. He passes the father and sits at other end. Says nothing. The camera does not follow him, does not establish him in the scene. It stays with the father. The father looks at him. He goes to the counter, gathers some dinner for the son, returns to the table, then follows the father into the toilet. He needs to hide his disappointment.
What about Tidal Barrier?
Imagine a framed shot. Sophie, one of the main characters. From this close-up a jump-cut to an empty frame. Slight pan to the right and the frame is found.
What is this about?
Another Sophie at another time.
The colour of her face could be different between the shots. Her features are different.
Or. The second shot, the same position, but a different focal length. She is further away - we are no nearer to understanding her - her face has changed (the colour, her face is in shadow), before we can know her she has changed again.
Or return to Tarkovsky. If the fundamental of cinema is capturing time, and the long-take is the evident way of doing so then is the long-take the central tenet of the shooting style of this film?

No. First...

No. First, before I can go there, I need to speak of something more.
Before the practicalities of lenses and long-takes vs short-takes, what might be my attitude to the whole thing?
I have been rereading Tarkovsky's Sculpting in Time. I think that I was interested in what he had to say about this attitude:

Artistic creation demands of the artist that he 'perish utterly', in the full, tragic sense of those words.

From these you can be certain what Tarkovsky made of artist as centre of the work: it is a mistake.
Quoting Tarkovsky, quoting Gogol:

...it is not my job to preach a sermon. Art is anyhow a homily. My job is to speak in living images, not in arguments. I must exhibit life full-face, not discuss life.

More on this, as he writes of Raphael's Sister Madonna:

...for the artist's thought is there for the reading: all too unambigious and well-defined. One is irritated by the painter's sickly allegorical tendentiousness hanging over the form and overshadowing all the purely painterly qualities of the picture.

So that is fairly clear.
I have not been at this business long, but I have shocked at the laziness, fear, and insecurity with which the industry approaches the business of making film. I suppose I might be more sympathetic to those that argue for tradition, or simplicity, who say they have no desire to experiment, they are practitioners, not artists, who truly believe that they are doing a service to the mainstream, entertaining them, making them smile, if they actually did know that tradition.
I once had director of photography tell me that we could not do this or that because we would be breaking the fourth wall. I come from theatre, and there you quickly learn what that term means, but he clearly did not. I would have forgiven him but for the ferocity and stubborness of his position, when he would tell me that this is the way you would do things, this is tradition when this was cleary not true.
I spent a lot of time in the edit suite trying to correct these fundamental errors. I wasn't experimenting either.
But Tarkovsky would go further than this. Even these traditions were false:

A mass of preconceptions exists in and around the profession. And I do mean preconceptions, not traditions: those hackneyed ways of thinking, that grow up around traditions and gradually take them over. And you can achieve nothing in art unless you are free from received ideas.

So you have to start again. What is the essence of cinema? What is cinema about?

...the birth of cinema was when man found the means to make an impression of time.
And often as he wanted, to repeat it and go back to it. He acquired a matrix for actual time.

Further:

The cinema image, then, is basically observation of life's facts within time, organised according to the pattern of life itself, and observing its time laws.

The word facts is important. So often we hear that this or that is symbolic. This is usually just laziness. Cinema's power is not in the symbol:

The purity of cinema, its inherent strength, is revealed not in the symbolic aptness of images (however bold these may be) but in the capacity of those images to epxress a specific, unique, actual fact.

So dismiss symbols. There is no ambiquity, something standing for another. There is first the fact.
Now I think on the films of Tarkovsky. What about that amazing long-take in Solaris, as Berton makes his way into the city, through tunnels and across overpasses? Or the closing shot of Mirror, in the field before the house, the grandmother and her grandchildren? Yes, there is much more here, but first is this Tarkovsky capturing time?
I might decide to dismiss Tarkovsky (I mean how can I do a tracking shot? They are too bloody expensive), but at least it begins the dialogue.

Some other challenges

Much of what I have written in the treatments describes images and sequences, which are difficult to test on paper.
The only way I can know if they work is to shoot them.
Similarly, the scenes between Sophie, Paul, and Claire must be tested with actors. These improvisations need to be shot as close as possible to the shooting strategy.
What is the shooting strategy? More to come.

Locations, London, flow, time and chance

This weekend I will be scouting for locations in East London, around Canary Wharf, East India Station, The Dome, Woolwich Road, the Tidal Barrier (of course), and up to Thamesmead. I will do stills and some video. I will uploads the stills, if they are any good.
Apart from the locations described in the treament, I am looking for images that may help me to develop the theme of the story. Flow. Time. Chance.
I will also try to capture a part of London that is all too must a part of the city: parts of the city that lack identity, no there there, as Jane Jacobs would say. They are places where people come and go, without being able or without wanting to take part in the time of the city. Their passing will go unnoticed.
These areas contrast with parts of London where the past seems to have been pressed right into the bricks.
These areas have always existed, but what is fascinating about Canary Wharf is that they are constructing this phenomenon in shiny glass and steel.

The one-story version - Tidal Barrier

A story about relationships, exploring the possibilities of who we might have been and who we might become.

Sophie has a great relationship with Paul. He knows who he is, and makes those around him comfortable. They live in the sky above the Thames, a hi-rise set of flats from where they can see river and the tidal barrier.
But it all begins to fall apart one day when they begin to look into the circumstance of their first meeting: coincidence.This seemingly innocent fact sets in motion a realisation that who they are, and thus who they have become is arbritrary. They could've as easily lived another life. Paul understands the threat and his desperation is driven further by the appearance of one of these other lives: for many nights now Sophie has seen a stranger parked below their flat, watching her. Sophie is frightened, Paul is angry, both instinctively understand the implications. One night they decide to confront the woman in the car. They are separated, and Sophie ends up wandering about the world of London at night. Both frightened and intoxicated by the freedom, she takes a part in this new world, in and around the Thames, and here she finds another life she would've lived without Paul.

It is not so straightforward

I am actually struggling through two different versions of the story.
One is described previously, but the other focuses on Sophie and Paul in the first story. I call this version the one-part version.
I was optimistic that 'three part version' had finally developed enough that everyone would agree it was clearer. But no. Some feel that one version works, some the other version is better.

The three-story version - Tidal Barrier

Three stories about relationships, exploring the possibilities of who we might have been and who we might become.
Sophie, Paul, and Claire, a triangle, with the addition of chance, place and time.
I am with this person. Where do I end, and the other begins? Who might I have been alone? By myself?
What if we had never met? How did we meet? Is there any way to believe in destiny? Was it only chance? If so, then it just as easily and legitimately might not have been. Such knowledge and belief can destroy the best relationship. After all, how can you wake every day and think it was only accidental that I am with this person?
And time. How might I change over time? Would the person I became want to/need to be with this person?

What else is there?

What else is there?
I have pages of notes, someone of which I am using as blog entries. I am also in the process of developing a photo project focused on the locations and ideas that I am developing in the story. I have some vague ideas of creating a photoblog.
There will be a website with some background information about the film, which will make sense of some of the entries to come.

What is there?

What is there?
I have been developing what I loosely refer to as treatment (a prose document which can be anywhere from one page to 100 pages and usually has no dialogue). Now film professionals will tell you that a treatment can be almost anything that will assist in the development of a script, but will scream you can do that if you take them at your word.
I would say that my treatment is more along the lines of a short story because my intention is to use as a basis for improvisation with actors.
Someone wrote of my treatment at the moment the confusion in it makes it a frustrating read.
This is probably true.

What is this?

What is this?
I am making a film. This blog is about the development of the thoughts and ideas that will go into developing a story, and this story will eventually become the film.